More expenses embarrassment for MPs

MPs were enduring yet more expenses embarrassment after it emerged
Gordon Brown had repaid another £500 and a minister submitted a £20,000 bill for repairing a bell tower.

The latest tranche of receipts published by the Commons provided more evidence of the way politicians were spending public money before the scandal erupted.

The PM has paid back the expenses claim for painting a summer house

Among the minutiae revealed was that shadow skills secretary David Willetts claimed for replacing 10 light bulbs, senior Tory MP James Arbuthnot asked for £43.56 to buy three garlic peelers from shopping channel QVC, and Foreign Secretary David Miliband was pursued by his local authority for late payment of council tax.

Mystery also surrounded a series of lengthy telephone calls to Canterbury that featured on the Prime Minister’s expenses claims from the height of the financial crisis. Speculation that Mr Brown was seeking guidance from the Archbishop of Canterbury were being discounted, but Downing Street refused to say who had been on the other end of the line.

Hundreds of thousands of receipts filed by MPs claiming second home allowance in 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 were published by the Commons. As with the set from 2004-2008 released in June, addresses and other “security sensitive” details were blacked out from the documents. However, the censorship appeared to have been toned down significantly in the wake of heavy criticism last time.

The premier quickly broke cover to announce he had paid back £500 claimed for painting a summer house at his home in Fife, saying that the spending was “questionable”. “I volunteered to do that,” Mr Brown said. “I looked through my expenses. I said I don’t want to claim for anything that is in any way questionable. Nobody asked me to do that.”

Mr Brown had already repaid more than £12,000 after Sir Thomas Legg’s review of second home allowances found he had made excessive claims for cleaning and gardening, as well as filing a duplicate receipt by mistake.

Number 10 was also forced to insist the Prime Minister had “full confidence” in defence minister Quentin Davies , after it emerged he submitted a receipt for £20,700 of work to his bell tower. Officials only paid £5,376 of the maintenance claim because the Grantham and Stamford MP had gone over his annual allowance limit.

On May 18, as the Westminster expenses scandal was breaking, Mr Davies wrote again seeking to clarify that he had never wanted the taxpayer to pay for the bell tower work. The invoice included covered a £10,330 roofing repair “together with a quite separate job (to the bell tower) for which I emphatically was not seeking any reimbursement”, he insisted.

In a statement released by his office, Mr Davies said the repairs were needed to prevent the bell tower collapsing and “smashing through the roof”. He added: “With hindsight, to avoid confusion, I should have asked for separate invoices.”